Category Archives: Marriage

Did Galina ever seduce a man into her bed? Did she ever find herself in that mellow surrender, with an even heartbeat, as she groomed her body — the millions of skin cells she had never cared for before — as she waited for her lover to take her out on the town, for a walk or a dinner at his parent’s home; so that later she could be disrobed, explored and tasted? consumed and worshiped, cared for?

Had she ever learned what it was like to know a man so intimately she could tell what he’d drunk for dinner just by the flavors of his bodily liquids? And had Galina known elation, the best kind of which can be experienced only in the highs of being in love; and was she then able to foresee that even though loss would eventually follow — always follow — it was all worth it, while unfolding?

Probably not.

But the word of Galina’s “willingness” began to roam the village. The bachelors reconsidered the cripple’s appearance: After all, she didn’t need to be a beauty queen for frolicking in the hay. They began to scheme amongst themselves. She probably wouldn’t put up too much of a fight; or demand for a man to leap through the endless rings of fire that belong to courtship. The married men with a lusty eye took notice of her waiting on the outskirts of fields at the end of their working day. So did their women:

“Hey, Mash? Isn’t that your girl hugging the fence over there, behind the tractor?” the women approached Galina’s mother, amused at first, but not for long.

“The devil’s dragged her out again!” the old woman grumbled, embarrassed. Lord knew, she’d had her hands full with this child! “I wish any man or death would just take her already!” (Oh, you think that’s uncharitable? I’ll see what blues you’d sing if ever you found yourself stuck in living out a Russian’s destiny! That roller coaster — is no joke!)

The women of the village began to shun the cripple. A fair competition or not, for all they knew, Galina shared the same anatomy between her legs; and men, being a canine type, let’s face it, wouldn’t have the will power to say “nyet” when an opportunity of getting some — of getting any — splayed out in front of their panting mouths. No longer was Galina invited to join the girls-in-waiting on village benches whenever they saw her limping with her cane, at dusk. They didn’t brush her hair, didn’t massage her bow-like back; or reached to scratch mosquito bites through her thick woolen tights, during the summer nights. When she showed up at church, the girls dispersed, but not before hissing a few slurs that could be overheard even by a deaf-mute. As far as they were concerned, it was better to be safe than find their boyfriends venturing out for some lay on the side, which, considering Galina’s growing neediness, was always nearby and easily available.

Galina, whose accident left her stuck in the mind of a child, couldn’t understand the change in their favors. Not at least until her mother Masha broke it down one day, while scrubbing her daughter’s unattractive body on a banya shelf:

“You ought to stop blabbering like this, my poor child!” she gently rubbed a straw clump against the raised red scars on her daughter’s back. “It’s not modest for a girl, first of all, to show off like this. And then, you’re making all the females jealous.”

Picking at her bellybutton, Galina defended herself: “But I speak the truth, didn’t you know? I will marry! I am no worse than all those other silly girls!”

“Of course, of course,” Masha soothed. “Of course, you will, my child. In time, you will.”

Galina’s mother took mercy on her daughter. What else did she have going for her but those innocent fantasies of rescue via marriage and the care of a man? But the poor simpleton! She had yet to learn that guilt and pity she provoked in other women made terrible accomplices, in the end; and that a woman’s generosity ran only as thick as her man’s attentiveness.

But listen she did. The very next Sunday, Galina didn’t dress up for church. She didn’t leave the veranda where she slept in the summer, to then wait by the side of the dirt road, to catch a ride in the milkman’s horse-drawn carriage. She stopped visiting the fields, or strolling through the village in search of young girls’ congregations. It seemed she locked herself at home during daylight. And only at sunset did she begin to leave the house and joining the babushkas: those old retired women who were cared for by their children if they were lucky; and if unlucky, the women who worked until their daily duties were completed after the last cow got home. They sat on the benches, like brown sparrows along a telephone line; stretching their arthritic limbs, adjusting their kerchiefs and shacking roasted sunflower seed with toothless gums, until their fingernails turned black and their tongues were raw and scarred by salt. There they sat, watching the rest of the living go by, and calling out to either Jesus or Mother Death, for the end of their — or others’ — misery.

At first, the old women scolded the cuz:

“You ought to waste your time by the band stage, and not with us!”

“Oy, don’t even tell me!” the others chimed in. “Now, did you see just what these youngsters wear, these days?! In my time, I wouldn’t show my naked knee to even my own husband.”

“Oy, dear little lord of ours! My granddaughter chops off her skirts like this on purpose! I found the tailor’s bill.”

The old women crossed themselves. Their religiousness did not die down, not with the revolution or the Party’s teachings. Harmless to most, they worshiped openly; and these old women had a point: What else would there be left of Russia’s soul, if not its fear of Father God or Mother Nature?

There, in the companies of babushkas, Galina started to pick up the dirt on every household in the village. And what a way to make a recovery! No matter the shared elation or tragedy, most mortals couldn’t resist a juicy piece of gossip.

Quite rapidly, Galina became the go-to for the latest news: She was the younger generation’s Sputnik that circled the village — from one bench to another — to measure and deliver back the temperatures around town. The misstep of her own fictional marriage was long forgotten, and by the fall — before the hay had finished drying out and got transported into hay storage shacks; and long before the housewives completed pickling cabbage and lining up their cellar shelves with jams; before the men piled up the wood for heating the stove in the winter — Galina became every household’s most welcomed guest.

Be it from a life-long deprivation of male attention or grandma Tanya’s diagnosis of Galina’s “messed-up nerves”, cuz’s hormones went berserk as soon as she dropped out of school after the sixth grade. In all fairness, there was not much use to furthering her education, Galina’s parents presumed: After the accident, she wasn’t bound for big things any longer. And the Russian inbred understanding that one was born into one’s circumstances — and no amount of prayer, chance or hard work would transcend a citizen into a higher, more fortunate caste — spiraled Galina’s life into one of a peasant. She would be following her parents’ path, and in that, no comrade could find much tragedy.

“But I’m going to marry!” she announced one Sunday morning, on the steps of a neighboring town’s church. The other girls-in-waiting surrounded and teased her for the name of her future husband. (Competition makes women one mean lot, especially when they are those middle-ground, okay-looking ones that hold onto their men with their teeth and fear.) But Galina remained secretive, as if she were the best of Soviet spies.

“You don’t have no fiance yet!” the young women challenged. I mean: Had she fallen off the rocker?! Who did she think she was?! Engagements took months to set up. Dozens of chaperone shifts were arranged by the elders. Sunday’s best, collected by the girl’s parents throughout her life, were dug out of the familial traveling trunks, washed and ironed, and put to use. And the honing of womanly duties — by the river bank where other housewives rinsed their laundry and in the kitchen; by the married women’s lectures on the suddenly poignant topics of personal hygiene and the horrors of their wedding nights — these things demanded serious commitment and courage on a girl’s part!

“It takes a lot of work to lure a man!” the girls-in-waiting lectured the crippled simpleton. There was no way she presented much competition! And they supposed they would’ve just let her dream on, had she not perturbed them with such a silly idea, in the first place.

And they did have a point: No one had ever seen Galina starch her petticoats or outline her eyes with sharpened charcoal sold at the department store, to which one had to ride a bus for two and a half kilometers. In the later part of summer, Galina had yet to travel to other women’s homes to help them pickle cabbage or to cure pork belly in salt baths whenever a local family decided to lessen its livestock count. And neither was she known to possess any skill mending socks or warding off a bad eye. She wasn’t in the know on how to start up a stove or a banya, for a man. She couldn’t brew home-made liquor or even a jar kvas. Such skills were expected of any bride, especially from one that could’t bewitch a man based on her looks alone.

“So what?!” Galina obnoxiously defended herself. She was an innocent, but any challenge against her word of truth — and she could throw a fit which even the devil would overhear. “My dad’s already traveled to three dinners two towns over!” she continued bragging. “He says even the chairman of the collective farm over there could be interested. (He’s got a handsome son, didn’t you know?)”

How much truth there was to Galina’s aspirations — no one knew for certain. But Galina’s father — an alcoholic who freelanced around town to clean people’s outhouses, or to build new ones — was not to be taken lightly, at least by the townsmen; for quite a sizable physique did uncle Pavel have on him! The man was a giant, barely fitting into doorways; and he was gossiped to have never shared a bed with his wife because there just wasn’t enough room for two. Pavel was known to sleep in the cow stable; and that is exactly where, according to the gossip, Galina had to have been conceived.

Every night, Pavel raised hell with vodka on his breath. Galina’s mother Masha had begun to lock him out of the house; and at dawn, she searched the village’s ditches and liquor store alleys and dragged her alcoholic giant home (where she would deposit him into the cow stable yet again).

So, even though Galina’s self-proclaimed bridal status appeared absurd to most, one had to consider the fear Pavel imposed on young grooms-in-the-making. And there were other factors to consider, as well:

“She does collect a sizeable pension,” the townswomen speculated after the news of Galina’s betrothal began to spread. “Not a bad deal for a dowry!”

Others approached the subject with medical facts: “Lord knows, so deprived her womanly parts have been, for all these year! I bet she’s not too difficult to bed.”

The women giggled. The subject of sex was not a frequent one in the idealistic minds of Soviet citizens. Like anywhere else in the world, men wanted it; but it was entirely a responsibility of the women to a. to put out or to hold out, and b. protect themselves in the process. But even with one’s gynecologist, it was inappropriate to comfortably, openly discuss such matters. So, to be born pretty was a questionable blessing, for a Russian girl. But to be born smart — to know how to negotiate her worth before the broken hymen, to smoothly transition herself from under the care of her father to that of her husband — that, in the eyes of women and their mothers, was a much more important entity. (So, that part about sex being enjoyable — in some women’s lives, they never knew of it. Enjoyment was left to the other types of women: the loose ones, the ones that every town had and loved to judge; and in the cities, they were the second “wives” that some husbands kept on the side, on weeknights.)

Her previous thoughts on motherhood had brought her no peace. There were times she feared them even; intolerably changing tram cars when in too close of a proximity to a small child or sometimes a pregnant woman; feeling her own intimidation at the span of her life rise up in her: What would happen if she were to have a child?

It was as if she was allergic to the very idea of it, perhaps until she was ready, with time. Except that readiness never really arrived: Fear simply changed places with acute loneliness to which the sometimes seemingly easy solution presented itself in a trustful face of an infant. Maybe, that’s it. May, that’ll fix it. Maybe, if only she had a baby, she’d learn how; and perhaps, she’d grow softer. But it could also be just the very opposite — losing traces of self in the chaos of unknowing; and every single time, she shook the idea out of her hair as if it were a mere layer of dust from the construction site she passed every morning, on her way to the university.

“But you don’t have much time!” the other women warned her, their faces altered by some insider knowledge, for which she was expected to be grateful. Many had already procreated more than once by her age. “You’ve gotta try it,” they suggested with knowing smiles. “You’re gonna love being a wife!” (No one ever stopped to differentiate between the two events: motherhood and marriage did not have to be bound into a sequence.)

And she’d seen her own former school mates float around the city bazar with growing swellings of their stomachs — “I didn’t know she’d gotten married already!” — appearing too hot, uncomfortable or weighed down; rarely looking blissful. To her, the young mothers appeared to have gone distances. They were gone, off to the places outside of all this: This place, in the middle of winter, always just making it.

Most of Larisa’s girlfriends had left the town in the first five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Angela got into a law school in St. Petersburg. Oksana left for Israel. It happened in such a rapid succession, she didn’t get a chance to ask anyone yet: Do you feel that way sometimes too? (Larisa’s mother seemed to have no tolerance for such questions.)

Meanwhile, mother’s girlfriends dropped loud hints in her vicinity:

“Perhaps, Larisa is just not into it.”

“All books — no boys.”

A bluestocking, the librarian type. An old maid. Larisa wasn’t necessarily plain looking, but had always been bookish; and that would be intimidating to anyone, let alone a man with a domestic proposition for her.

“She should try putting on lipstick sometimes. She’s not that bad looking after all!”

It had to be a particular quality to the Russian women: to cross the lines of respect into forced familiarity, as if, just on the mere basis of their common sex, they could treat her as an fumbling ignoramus. Some of her mother’s girlfriends she always found invasive and somehow intentionally diminutive. It was if they knew better, and she should too. Often disguised with good wishes, they invaded and pointed out where she somehow didn’t measure up to the accomplishments of others, even though she, all along, strived for something different; something more specific, more organic to its environment: like the color of sunset before a thunderstorm, or the way her footsteps sounded after each first snowfall and they moved the heart to awe by the magnanimity of it all, even though it couldn’t be — nor needn’t be — described.

And then, there was their insincerity, one might even call it “mean spirits”. Larisa looked to her mother for a back-up, but the woman didn’t see it her way: Mother was always better at belonging:

“Such things, Larisa, they take a woman’s heart to understand!”

The little girl had let go of her grandmother’s skirt, sat down onto the dirt floor of the church and rested her chin on top of the propped up knees. Larisa hadn’t noticed that the child had been studying her. The hum of the recorded organ had carried her away; not because she would’ve rather been elsewhere. No, she enjoyed drifting off like this, and then observing the world from a haze of her own thoughts; vague and left better undefined.

And she had known men — one Pyotr Nedobry — who forced their own thoughts to be defined and insisted to interpret hers. With attentiveness rooted in hunger, Pyotr would study her with desire: as if she could fix it, be his long sought-out solution, whatever had been missing out of her life. And when he, last May, lifted her up over his shoulder and ran toward the lake, she was expected to laugh. Instead, she couldn’t catch her breath. Too late, she thought. Such romance no longer tempted her. Or maybe, she was the type to have lived out her youth already, for there was nothing left to miss of it; no delightful memory but the mournful knowledge that she, indeed, was never really youthful.

Pyotr Nedobry placed her down, that day, on the lawn, by the bank.

“The dandelions!” Larisa tenderly whispered. They were everywhere!

“Oh, I know! So annoying!” Pyotr exclaimed, and he took off his jacket so that they could sit down without staining their clothes. Not at all what she had meant!

They spoke while looking out. He would pick up blades of semi-dry grass, small branches, sharp-edged pebbled and continue sticking them into her slip on shoes. Hurtful, irritating — he demanded too much!

If she were to go for it, she knew at first the attention would be elating; and it would lighten her days for a while. But she had already done that, a number of times! Once with a student from Argentina who convinced her that he would be her life’s regret if she didn’t let him woo her. He wasn’t. And all this attention eventually turned on itself. Everything that they would learn of each other could become ammunition, for it was humanly impossible for one woman to get the job done. She would grow tired and mourn the mysteries she’d surrendered under the influence of lust.

“All these girly secrets!” Pyotr smirked, looking down at her, sideways. He was already becoming mean.

And she — was already gone.

Larisa looked up at the statue of Christ. The sun, parting the clouds after a week of snowfall, shined through the colored bits of the mosaic windows; and a column of caramel-colored light came down onto the thorn-crowned head. Larisa felt warmer: That’s it! That’s how she wanted to discover beauty: never expecting it, never molding the circumstances that were out of her control; but by simply and habitually mending her spaces, she could give room for it all — to flood in.

For as long as I could remember, my sister was always afraid of water. She was eight years older than me; and as we both grew up, her inability caused me confusion, delight and pride at my own skillfulness — exactly in that order.

“That’s ‘cause you were born a total daddy’s girl!” Marinka teased me. She was jealous. Obviously.

It had become somewhat of a tradition between the two us to huddle up in her bunk bed at night (until she’d left for college, Marinka would always have the top); and for hours at a time, we flipped through the albums of black-and-white family photos, while Marinka told me the stories that predated me. The stiff pages of teal cardboard smelled like the chemicals from the darkroom. Lying on my stomach, I studied the contours traced by Marinka’s fingers, until my elbows became sore.

In the year of Marinka’s birth — 1967 — the Soviet Union was peaking towards its highest glory. My sister was lucky to be born with a promising future of the citizen of the “Best Country in the World”. But in exchange for that giant favor, our dear Motherland claimed the life our father. Well, not literally, of course: This isn’t your typical sob story, of vague third-worldliness, in which the parents die off too young, leaving their poor children seriously messed-up for the rest of their lives. Dad just had to work a lot, that’s all. So, Marinka wasn’t exposed to a fatherly influence during those tender, formative years.

For weeks, for months at a time the old man would be gone from our household. According to Marinka, it made our mother none too happy.

“Really?” I whispered while patting yet another image of my mother holding her firstborn in a professionally done family portrait, while father was, well, not there.

At that point Marinka would realize she’d gone too far — after all, I was only six years old — and clumsily, she changed the subject: “Ugh! Stop groping my photos so hard! You’re gonna leave a mark!” I sat up into an imitation of her cross-legged position. The secret was to wait for Marinka’s temper flares to fizzle out.

Soon, the story continued.

In response to his woman’s nonsense, father would smile discretely; and mother would have no choice but take his word for it. No, wait. Considering the man never spoke much, it was his silence that she had to trust. And if dad were a cheating, lying scumbag, like the likes of his coworker Uncle Pavel — a handsome, salt ‘n’ pepper haired player with a mustache of a Cossack — he could’ve gotten away with it. I mean, the man was gone all the time. No matter the town or the city in which the family settled (for half a decade at the most), soon enough dad would go off to the same place called “the Polygon”.

Now, that’s exactly the part that Marinka could never clarify for me: While I patted the images of our uniformed father — gingerly this time — she couldn’t explain if he was going to the same place, or if our glorious Motherland had these Polygons up the wahzoo.

“Did mama cry?” I detoured back to gossip.

Marinka considered. “Nah. If she did, I never saw it!” Out came the photo of mother surrounded by her colleagues, laughing at the camera.

What else was the woman to do? After about a week of her spousal absence, mother would begin going over to her girlfriends for dinner nearly every night. Sometimes, Marinka came along. But on Saturdays, all the women dressed up and went to a discoteca, leaving my poor sister to her own devices.

Sure enough, “You idiot!” sis scoffed. “She waited until I grew out of them before she started going out!” For a moment, we both studied mother’s graduation portrait in which she, a Komsomol member, looked like that one actress from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. “You’re so dense sometimes, Irka, I swear!”

Before my sis would succeed in chasing me out of her bunk bed though, I managed to give a decent comeback:

“Ooh! Look at you, using big words and stuff. Dense does as dense sees!”

I don’t know about the rest of the world and its children — who, as our Motherland promised, did NOT have as happy of childhoods as we did — but Marinka’s telltale threats were worse than, say, the warning of the nuclear attack from America. Mom was the biggest disciplinarian around town! Or maybe even in the whole of the Soviet Union!

Sometimes, Marinka did manage to tell on me. But with age, I’d gained enough escape routes from the house, to never let my mother’s disciplinarian belt to graze the skin of my ass. If worse came to worst, I climbed out of our kitchen window and hid in the giant pear tree, in the garden. No one but armies upon armies of honey bees was ever much interested in that giant monster anyway. In the summer, they flunked the heavy branches of sour fruit. But for the rest of the year, that pear tree made an excellent hiding place.

Besides, from an early age, I had noticed the difference in the athletic predispositions between the women of our family. That is to say that my mother and sister had none! I, on the other hand, was the best son that father could ever desire! I could run faster than any of the boys in my elementary school, and had scabs to show for it. Playing with my sister’s girlfriends didn’t interest me in the least, unless, of course, they were jumping rope. Then, I was like a grasshopper gone berserk inside a glass jar. And nothing transcended me into a better sense of zen than to climb trees and to organize and reorganize my father’s tool box, over and over again.

“So typical!” she thought after having gotten the message about his running late:

“Traffic. B there in 5. Smiley face.”

The part about the smiley face was written out. In the very moment of reading his message, she was not tickled by his charm at all. The joke felt stale and smart-Alec-y, and it was probably aimed at her expense:

Well! He remembered that but not that I despise tardiness. “So disrespectful!” she muttered to herself.

She’d already parked the car and taken the stairs. A lanky man going the opposite way in the staircase overheard her. Behind his bifocals, he blinked rapidly and hugged the wall a little more. A tourist! She, for a brief moment, considered covering it up: by pretending to be on her cell phone or improvising a tune to which the overheard words could belong. But she was too annoyed. She clammed up until alone again, on the next flight of stairs.

What irritated her the most, it seemed, was that after all these years, he hadn’t changed at all. She had. She had had to! He’d altered the course of their lives with a single request to end to their marriage four years ago. She moved herself across the country, as if her shame would lessen with no mutual witnesses around. She’d gotten tired to wrench her guts out in front of friends. Their sympathy was too short of a consolation anyway, with nothing on the other side of it — but an even more agitated loneliness.

In a new city, she could blame all the hardships on her relocation. That way the divorce would come secondary; and on the list of common fears — moving, death, break-ups, public speaking — some of hers would be at least on the same plank. Divorce or departure. Departure or divorce. They became interchangeable causes for every new obstacle for a while. But eventually, each claimed its own time of day. Departure took the daylight, while nights were consumed by the consequences of the divorce. She started going to bed earlier.

When things weren’t well, she’d text-message the ex. It was a habit of the fingers — not of the heart. She took him bouncing between her little devastations and the recently increasing occurrences of her gratitude. No matter her original intention though, they always ended up bickering. Recycling became their long-distance pattern. But it seemed to her — and she knew she wasn’t alone in this — they both found comfort in that repetition, how ever painful the results.

“Fuck that, D! What do YOU want?” her stepbrother Tommy, with whom she’d grown close through all of this, would say. The man never slept; and when she called in the midst of her own insomnia, she’d often catch him painting at sunrise in New York, never having gone to bed at all.

Tommy was adamant that no good would come from her constant contact with the ex. “All you’re doing is delaying the pain, man. He won’t change. It’s all about you!”

But that was exactly was she feared. It was easier to fish for an apology — or at least a recognition — in her interactions with the ex: some sort of an acknowledgement of all that former goodness of hers that he had taken for granted, by ending it. It was as if she’d wanted him to love and lose again (someone else, of course, because even she wasn’t dumb enough to go in for seconds), just so he could learn to miss her. It was the only route to getting even that she had known.

The ex and she continued fighting. For weeks afterward, she’d wait for an apology. There would be substantial silence (in which she began to see glimpses of a lighter life, a better self). After a timeout though, his messages would come in flurries, a few days in a row: Some woman wore her perfume on the subway. He’d found an old photo in his college notebook. A mutual friend had asked about her. He missed her legs, her hair… By what right?!

In the beginning, she did respond reflexively, as if flattered by the contact. But when his tone turned whiny — he “missed her”, “wanted her” — she got irritated fast: Who’s fault was that, exactly?! And when he began insinuating at his lust, she would get struck with guilt toward his new woman. The pattern grew old, like the baby blanket from her own childhood which she’d been saving for her firstborn. The firstborn took its time happening while the blanket became a reminder of yet another one of her inadequacies. She began to feel hard of forgiveness. There was no way around it: He’d made a mistake; and she, still picking up the pieces on the receiving end, failed to let go.

“I mean: Do you even want him back?” Tommy sounded flabbergasted. He seemed so different from her! Stronger.

But Tommy was different: He belonged to a separate genetic line of bold spirits: artists, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, marine biologists, heros. At family gatherings, they all came in with colorful stories about the world in which neither habit nor fear seemingly played any role. Her people were hospital administrators and medical assistants, for as long as she remembered. Being concerned with records of pain, causes and possible treatments was their daily bread.

And the lavashes were indeed worth the wait! Still warm and covered in flour, against Inna’s skin, they felt like those smooth boulders from the beaches of Odessa, upon which she, as a child-delegate to the biggest Soviet Pioneer Camp — the Artek — used to fall asleep. After being pummeled by the waves of the Black Sea, she would crawl out and rest atop of them, out of breath and tired out by all that laughter and by the salty water that tickled, stung and got inside her nose, eyes and mouth. The sun, permanently in high zenith, as it seemed, shone onto her like an anomaly unseen in the moody climates of Russia to which the family continued to relocate for her father’s job. And only the fear of being left behind by her Artek teammates would keep Inna awake.

Eventually, she managed to talk her parents into signing her out for the whole afternoon at a time and taking her to the beach with them. It was their month-long summer vacation, for which the family had been saving up for nearly half a year; and it appeared to be one the more exceptional times in her parents’ marriage, when mother was jolly at every visit. She sported a brand new haircut a la Mireille Mathieu and a collection of summer dresses Inna had never seen her wear before. On their downhill walk from the Artek campus to the beach, mother, who trotted ahead, let the wind take a hold of her skirt and reveal the back of her highs, all the way up to that part where during the winter, on their outings to banya, Inna would notice long and curly black hairs, coarser than anywhere else along mother’s body. If ever the wind did scandalous tricks with mother’s dress, Inna looked up to notice her father’s grin, thrilled and shy; and if he appeared embarrassed at all, it was at being caught glancing at his wife with this much pleasure. Inna felt delighted: She knew she was witnessing something secret about her parents; something she could not yet understand, but knew it had to be a very good sign.

By the time Inna would wake up on the beach, however, suddenly chilly from the cold breeze of the sunset yet still finding some warmth on the boulder’s surface, she would find her father nearby, in his swimming shorts and asleep underneath a newspaper. Only a trace of her mother’s body could be found in the flattened patch of beach sand next to him. To console the 10-year old Inna about such a stealthy departure took more than her father’s patient explanation about mother’s obligations to visit friends in Odessa: It took three cones of chocolate ice-cream.

The warm flatbreads that brought on the memories of that summer now stretched between Inna’s fingers and teeth. Inside each bite, she tasted the chewy texture that, if combined with a warm glass of milk, could make a soul howl for the ways of her motherland! The two women would take turns pinching the edges of the breads that stuck out of her mother’s sizable purse, while they made their way to the bus stop; then again while waiting for the bus. Inna’s mother would eat only until a parent of one of her students — current or former — showed up on the platform. She would become all business then, shaking the crumbs off her clothes and asking for Inna to remove any residue of the flour from her face or decolletage. She then left Inna to her own devices, to harbor the hopes that perhaps once aboard the bus, mother would drop all this formality again and return to the repeated game of discussing just how good this batch of purchased lavashes turned out to be:

“Best ever!”

“Better than that one time, remember?”

“Yes, yes. But remember that other time, when they were a little burnt along the edges? So crunchy!”

This time would be no different. While mother chatted up the father of her leading Math student, Inna stole pinches of the warm, stretchy dough from the purse. Out of the dough, she began to sculpt geometric shapes whose names they’ve learned in the last academic quarter. Turned out: a cube was a more cooperative structure. Each of its ribs could be measured by the tips of Inna’s index fingers and thumbs. Interestingly, no matter the change of a tactic, the surfaces a pyramid defied precision and demanded more focus.

“Hypotenuse is a rat,” Inna recited a rhyme they’d learned in order to remember the function of this foreign name and concept. “And it runs from an angle to an angle…”

In the midst of conforming a perfect sphere into an ovoid, Inna noticed a figure of a man nearing their platform. He was coming from the furthest removed corner of the bus stop. Dressed in military uniform, he carried a small travel bag of brown leather. In all of his movements, the man possessed a certain manner of discipline and economy. Everything about him said: order, cleanliness, grace.

“Papka,” Inna uttered to herself — a habit for which she was lucky to not have yet earned the reputation of being strange.

At her school she was mostly thought of as quiet; and being the smallest child in her class, was also considered the weakling of the group. However, she could never own up to the consequences of her character alone: So vapid and wide-spread was the reputation of her mother, she felt she would walk in her mother’s shadow until she herself, once grown, would move to a big city and become a famous Soviet ballerina. Or the first female astronaut to land on the moon. Then, they would all realize just how special she was, all along!

“Mom,” she tugged the scratchy material of the pink-lavender skirt. (How ever did this woman manage to survive in a wool skirt, in the balmy, mid-August air? Suffering certainly had to be a part of mother’s love of fashion.)

Mother, in the throws of laughter at something her Math student’s father had said, ignored Inna’s hand. “Mama!” Inna tugged again, rougher.

With a single look darted over her shoulder, mother caught Inna’s wrist with feline precision, suddenly forgetting about protecting her fresh nail polish from an accidental scratch. Her eyes shimmered with aroused temper:

“What. Have I taught you. About interrupting when adults are talking?” she slowly pushed the words through the tightly closed crowns of her front teeth.

Inna felt her stomach tighten, as it always did whenever she found herself in trouble. The Math student’s father was witnessing it all.

Inna lowered her eyes then lifted them again with pleading courage, “But mama… It’s papa.” And before tears deformed her mouth and speech, she made a vague gesture in the direction of the Army officer, who by now — having noticed the two women himself — was making a determined, yet balletic stride across the platform.

“I like it,” one said, “I think” (unusually sheepishly for her nature). “It’s got some,” she rotated her wrists up in the air, looking for the less poetic word, “‘good light’.” It took a talent to be so vague. Or it took years of mutual knowledge and histories of hurt.

The younger one averted her eyes quickly. She was getting better at busying herself in the kitchen. Throughout her childhood, she’d witnessed mother’s chaos when other people came over to visit their place. They had been lucky that way, due to her father’s reputable profession: Always finding better living quarters, so others came over quite a bit. Wanting to be the talk of the town, mother buzzed and chattered in the kitchen; and she would bang the drawers with aluminum dinnerware and slam the cupboards in an orchestra of her exhibitionist domesticity.

While mother whipped up meals and refilled drinks, her girlfriends wandered around nosily, every once in a while coming upon a tiny girl, with eyes so large they took up half of her face, playing her own game of house in the furthest corner of the bedroom. Alone.

“So cute!” the women hissed, turning on their heels unhappily for having to divert their poking.

Mother continued conducting the percussions in her kitchen:

“She’s so quiet, that child! She’s all — my husband!”

The women moved about the living-room; lurked by the family’s photographs; touched, shifted, sniffed, demanded to know the origin of things:

“You are one lucky bitch, I hope you know.”

“They meant it as a compliment,” after the women’s departure, mother would attempt to clarify things — the delicate things that her daughter could not understand yet (but perhaps with time, she would). The evil smirk of the local Algebra teacher branded itself into her memory: How could these women mean anything good? But mother didn’t want to hear it: “Stop asking stupid questions anyway! This is adults’ business.”

But now:

“So,” the older woman spoke from the bedroom doorway and eyed the open, empty space. “Are you going to ask Mike to ship you the bed?” (Pause.) “Or do you plan to house this draft in here forever?”

“What do you mean by that?” the young woman stopped, knife in her hand.

“I mean, haven’t you, guys, divided things up officially yet?”

The young woman looked back down at the gutted pickled fish under her fingers, on the cutting board. It was a task that every Russian woman performed from A to Z. From A to YA. From A — to I. Her mother would’ve drowned the detailed fish in a pool of sunflower oil; and it would stare out, with dehydrated eyeballs from underneath a layer of butchered onions meant to cover up a job so messily performed.

While peeling onions, mom would begin to cry demonstratively:

“Oy! I so pity the little bird!”

What did the bird have to do with the fish? The bird — to I. The I — to eye. Still, mother was a funny actress, so the child would spit with laughter. She couldn’t help it: She was still in love with her original prototype back then.

She now thought of that one time a thin fishbone lodged in her throat for a week; and how she gagged every night, while mother hooked her sharp nails into the back of her tongue. For months to follow, sometimes, loose scales would reveal themselves stuck on her clothes or skin; or swimming in buckets of water with floor-scrubbing rags. Mom was a disaster in the house.

In her own kitchen, however, the young woman never kept the head. She wished she had a cat to feed it to. A cat — to make-up for the missing child, to make the loneliness less oppressive. She stared at the oval crystal bowl, with even filets of pink meat, neatly arranged.

She herself was a better housekeeper, yet heading toward a divorce nonetheless. Most likely:

“Mike and I aren’t talking, mom. You know that.”

“Oh! Yes. I see,” the old woman eyed the empty bedroom yet again: Why so much space for someone with defeated ovaries then? “You, young people! You have no concept of marital endurance any more.”

She swore, he thought of the idea first. At least, that’s how she remembered it. In his defense (why was she so willing to defend him?): In his defense — she wasn’t “willing”. He was right.

“It’s just that… something isn’t working,” Mike told her over the phone, the week of one Thanksgiving which they’d agreed to spend apart. He “couldn’t do it anymore”. Her work. Her books. Why was he always taking second place after her life? Once she hung up, she cried, of course, but mostly out habit; and out of habit, she started losing weight and sleep. That’s what a wife in mourning was supposed to look like, she decided. She cropped her hair, and started wearing pants and laced up wingtip shoes. In their crammed-in basement apartment in the Bronx, she found room to pace and wonder, “Why? Why? Why?”

Her girlfriends were eventually allowed to visit the site of her disastrous marriage. They bitched; they called him names. They lurked, touched, shifted, sniffed. They studied family photographs, still on display, for signs of early check-outs. The women patted her boyish haircut and teared up a bit too willingly, some of them — being slightly grateful for feeling better about their own men.

And then, one balmy New York August afternoon, she called him from a pay phone in Harlem.

“Meet me for dinner.”

An hour later, he showed up with lilies. After a dry peck that tasted unfamiliarly, she lead the way to a Dominican joint whose wall-full of French doors was always taken down for the summer. It breathed the smell of oil — and of fried everything — onto the sweaty pedestrians on Broadway.

On their side of the missing wall, the night dragged on with a strained politeness. His eyes were glossy, wet. She stared out onto the street. From either the heat of New York’s August and the lack of ventilation, the giant buds sweated under the plastic wrap; and by the time they finished picking through a pile of fried plantains, the lilies open completely, and just like everything at that time of the year — from sweat glands to subway sewers to perfume shops — they began to smell aggressively, nearly nauseating.

“I’m going to California,” she announced after finishing her white fish.

“Why?”

She looked down: After their six-month separation, she had begun to wear dresses and curl her hair again. She’d gained a certain swagger in the hips from wearing flat shoes through every season in New York. The flesh of femininity was finally beginning to lose the aftertastes of her youth’s self-loathing.

Not having gotten an answer, “When?” — he examined her with wet eyes of a lab.

She looked down again. The suppleness of her brown chest surprised her. She looked up: “Soon.”

Vagueness as a revenge: She’d learned that from her mother, the best that ever was! She owed him nothing. He was the one who’d given up! He was the one who left! But now, it settled at the bottom of her stomach, along with the plantains, like something begging for its freedom. And she, in her defense, was no longer “willing”.

In grandma’s house, there were no days of waking late. They could’ve been such days, but it would take some stubborn courage to not succumb to my innate Russian guilt and to stay in bed while the rest of the household filled with busy noises.

The women would always rise first. My grandma was the first to make it to the kitchen, and after the dry footsteps of her bare, callused feet against the wooden floor, intermixed with the thumping of her wooden cane, I’d soon smell the smoke of an oil lamp that she’d start inside a cove of a stone stove, in the corner.

That thing took up half the room: Built of wood and red brick, the stove was the oldest characteristic of a traditional rural Russian home. Its purpose was not only for cooking, upon a single metal plate located right above the fire pit; but for the heating of the entire house. So, the bedroom was often located on the other side of it. The stove was always painted with white chalk; and after a few of my un-welcomed visits of my grandma’s cot, where I would try to warm up my feet but leave markings on the wall, the men of the house took turns repainting that damn thing, upon the grouchy old woman’s instructions.

“Little gypsy children have dirty little feet,” my grandfather would joke through the side of his mouth in which he perpetually held a slowly fuming pipe.

Per old woman’s instructions, he was not allowed to smoke in the house. So, I’d shrug my skinny shoulders knowing that I too had some info on him that could get him also in trouble, really fast.

The fire pit was covered with a rusty door on squeaky hinges. The pots were stored onto the shelves along its wall. But right on top of the structure, one could pile up blankets and pillows stuffed with duck feathers — and sleep. But in my grandma’s house, no living soul was welcome to lounge around up there. (No soul was welcome to lounge around anywhere, really; because the family’s collective labor was its own religion. Except on Sundays: And then, there would be church.)

Two curtains, each about three meters long, were hung to hide the gap between the top of the stove and the ceiling. So narrow was the opening, a grown man would have to climb up there from the side and remain reclining. But I could sit up and lean against the pillar that lead up to the chimney; which I would still do whenever I would not be caught. I’d drag up my toys, but mostly books; and spend hours at a time, frying my soles against the hot stones. Some days, the heat would be expiring until the adults returned and started another fire. But late at night, after the dinner had been cooked, the pots — soaked in a tub of warm, soapy water, then rinsed under the spout sticking out from the wall of the house, outside — the stove was hot. The wooden floor of the kitchen had to be scrubbed every night; and under the strict overlooking eyes of the old woman, the young wives of her sons would find themselves on hands and knees. These chores would make the women be the last to bathe. They’d be the first to rise — and last to rest.

It would require a conspiracy between my motha and I for me to sneak up into the gap behind the curtains. First, she’d push me up, then store the drying cast iron pots in a row and pile them up in such a way, they’d create a wall behind which I could hide, if only I could hold still and flat on my back.

“You must be quiet like a spy. Shhh!” my motha’s hiss at me while winking and tucking me in. Her smirking eyes would tickle my insides with anxiety: at the adventure and the danger of being discovered by the old woman.

I wasn’t sure where motha and I would have to go if my grandma followed through with that punishment. And I was definitely confused at why my father would not follow us into our homeless adventure. But the threat seemed real enough to keep me snickering into the pillow — from little fear but mostly the thrill.

I’d hear my motha’s hands moving the floor rag quickly and impatiently. I’d hear the dry footsteps and the cane of the old woman spying on her, while muttering passive-aggressive instructions on how to do it better. The men would come inside the house together and they would wash their faces and their sweaty necks above a metal sink in the corner, while the women helped by pouring water from aluminum cups. The men would puff and spray liquids from their mouths and noses; and I would hear the women’s chuckles, as the cold splatters landed on their exposed arms and chests.

“I’ll get you after she goes to sleep,” my motha’d promise, and as the house settled down, I’d play a guessing game with others‘ noises and shadows upon the walls and ceiling.

And sometimes, I’d wake up to another day of never rising late. Most likely, I would have drifted into slumber while waiting for my motha to come back. Then, I would have to wait some more, upon a now cold stove, while listening to the noises of the waking household.

I couldn’t yet understand the griefs and grudges that the adults held against each other. But from behind the closed curtains, I could watch their uncensored selves and make up stories.

It is truly fucking amazing, but for the very first time in my life, being single does not seem like a social ineptness — a disease of which I am a carrier.

So, as I stand in front of an overwhelmed ticket cashier at my fancy local movie theater, I no longer feel awkwardly apologetic when I say:

“One — for Crazy, Stupid, Love, please.”

The chubby, stressed-out girl in an ill-fitted penguin-like uniform looks up at me. It’s the weekend, but I had just come from a day of hard work. My hair is pulled back. I’m exhausted, not in a self-pitying way of someone burdened by survival; but in a relaxed, proud manner of someone making her own way in the world.

“Was that: One?” she repeats.

I thought I spoke clearly. I usually do, with strangers, subjecting only my beloveds to my habit of speaking in code.

“Yes,” I say, and I smile as kindly as my tired, non-pretty face allows.

The girl purses her lips and flips her computer screen toward me:

“Where would you like to sit?” she says.

I don’t really know how it happens in the lives of other young girls, but in my own adolescence, I’ve never been taught how to get myself successfully paired up. There is nothing my father wanted more, of course, than for me to get married and settle down, always in close proximity to his house. He somehow hoped I would figure it out on my own and — magically! — end up with a decent guy (which by Russian definition meant someone who could hold his liquor and was good at fishing). I would end up with someone my father could trust enough to pass me into his care.

At the same time though, he never talked to me about dating. It made him uncomfortable — this idea of my inching my way toward the problems of adulthood, day after day. And the sequence of my father’s glottal sounds while he sat on the edge of my bed one night and tried to talk to me about sex would make Bill Murray want to take notes: It was so uncomfortably funny.

“Um, P?” I had to interrupt him, because I wanted to remember my father as a hero, NOT as a man incapable of uttering the word “sex” while blushing like a teenager. “It’s past midnight and I’ve got an English final in the morning.”

I was in tenth grade.

Not kidding. Dad — or “P”, as I called him, lovingly, in my habit of speaking in code — had always been delusional about my sexual development. I wasn’t even sure he knew I had gotten my period four years prior. Most of the time, we just talked about my studies. Because all my life, I had been an exemplary student, earning my way into the best private school in our city; and my education — was the biggest of my own concerns anyway.

“You just gotta be careful…” he mumbled that night, and once he got up, he would fumble with the seam of his thermal shirt and blink rapidly to avoid my stare. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“I am, P. Good night,” and I smiled at him as kindly as my tired face would allow.

And that was it. That was the only time P chose to suffer through that topic. Not even after my parents’ divorce would either of them invest any time in explaining the complexity of human relationships to me: the work that it took to be successfully paired up, and the amount of self-awareness; the amount of commitment.

Whatever I learned about dating I would learn from my contemporaries. Boys would be the main topic in the cafeteria of my college, to which I had arrived on a full scholarship. Again, in my 20s, education would remain the biggest of my concerns. By the end of our studies, many of my classmates would be engaged, or married; or moving back home where they were awaited by their families and boyfriends. I, however, was en route to graduate school, hustling my way to earn more scholarships.

In our rendezvous to the City, we would occasionally meet up — my college contemporaries and I — and they would purse their lips at my awkwardly apologetic answer:

“Yes. I’m still (insert a shrug) — single.”

In my dating life, I would feel clumsy and uncertain. By the example of my contemporaries, before each date, I would dress myself up into what seemed to be a better, prettier version of me: And during the date itself, I would often gain a headache. Because by the end of it, I couldn’t keep track of all the omissions and alterations I would manufacture. And when I wouldn’t hear from my dates for weeks, I would throw myself back into my studies.

Something would change of course, with time. Somewhere during the pursuit of my dreams, I would begin to sit in my skin a bit more comfortably. There would be a slew of reckless relationships and even a failed marriage; but I would begin to learn about dating, by trial and error. And the one thing that eventually became obvious was this:

I was NOT like most of my contemporaries. I was someone paving her own way in the world since a very young age, via her education. I was also an immigrant who had to work twice as hard as her contemporaries in order to be their equal. So, there was no way I could use someone else’s skills and opinions in order to pair myself up, successfully.

Because I am no longer willing to mold myself into a better, prettier version of me, I am beginning to find that the version of me already in existence — is pretty fucking amazing. And that very version, however tired or un-pretty, I now carry into my dates; and I surprise myself that the men I choose seem to be more comfortable with me as well. They are more confident, more fun.

And then I move on, to more adventures and dreams, in the pursuit of which I don’t really need to be paired up — UNLESS successfully.

“Um, miss?” the penguin-girl appears even more stressed out since meeting me. “Where would you like to sit? We’re almost sold out, but since you’re single…”

I smile. I choose the best seat in the house, buy myself a single latte and wandering through the lobby’s bookshop, in a relaxed, proud manner of someone who can afford herself these tiny privileges, in life.

I am someone — making her own way in the world. And I’m pretty fucking amazing!

Beautiful beach. Beautiful bodies. Very beautiful boys, tall and lean — lovely, really. And those gorgeous behinds of the girls — who are also beautiful — passing along the tide.

It’s lovely, really, to not be so blind to life.

I’ve only got an hour here — a small break I’ve permitted myself smack in the middle of my day. I have chosen this life of malleable schedule; and it demands much more responsibility than showing up at one place, every day, at eight. But then again, that other life seems so brutal. That other life of others: I’ve tried it. I can do better.

An hour. That’s all I’ve got. I’ve imposed a halt onto my day and taken a detour to the beach. I’m going to make up for it later, I think; and I wish I could be more romantic about it: more romantic than crawling out of my skin with my chronic impatience at time. Just how much longer is it going to take until I achieve the life that’s unlike the life others? A life of my own: How long does it take to mold?

In this part of the beach, mostly populated by locals, it is always so quiet — and so beautiful. It’s lovely, really. But I do wish I could be more romantic about it: I wish I would catch myself thinking about the opposite shore where I just happened to be born several decades ago — and that must be why I keep coming by here. To recharge. To reconnect. To think of home, as others often do — in their own life of others. But I have left that shore — that’s the truth — on purpose, several decades ago. It wasn’t working. I tried it. I could do better.

Still, I raise myself up onto my elbows and squint at the line where the dark blue of the water meets the dusty white of the sky: Nope. I can’t really see home from here. Home — is just gonna have to be wherever I am.

But still: It is so lovely, really. And it’s lovely — to not be so blind to life.

I watch a threesome of youth things fling a frisbee to each other, near the tide. One of the boys is stocky. He’s the funny type. I can tell by the way he makes the other two double over with laughter, even though I can never hear the ending to his jokes. The other boy is tall and lean. He’s lovely, really. Whenever he leaps to catch that thing in midair, he reminds me of a dog. I wish could be more romantic about it. I wish I could catch myself thinking about a lovely boy of my near past. But that’s all done now. The thinking, the rethinking — the endless groveling for reasons, clarifications; hastily gathered apologies, crumbs of hope for a reunion, or for some sort redemption, at least — that’s all done now.

I watch the boy launch the frisbee with a mere bend and release of his wrist. Vaguely, I begin recalling all the ones I have treated with kindness, in my life. Thankfully, the ones that got the lesser of me I can count on only two fingers. Because less than — wasn’t really working. I tried it though. I can do better.

And then, there is the girl of the threesome. I think she is very young, hiding her torso underneath a long-sleeved surfing top. She giggles too, a lot and often completely unprovoked. But it’s the ruffle that circumvents her hips along the bikini bottom that tells me she’s still got so much life ahead of her, and way too much youth.

Out of the three, she is the least equipped for the game. When she dashes to catch a throw, she never takes off on time and she always misses. And when the frisbee lands, she runs to it, while laughing; bends over to pick it up, then starts slapping it against the bottom of her right butt cheek, shaking off the sand and making the rest of her body vibrate with suggestion. I think I can overhear her apologies:

“Sorry,” she giggles, vibrating with laughter and the bounce she has started against her gorgeous behind. “I suck!”

But the boys are mesmerized. They don’t mind the stupid game, or that it slows down every time it’s her turn to throw. The tall, lean lovely attempts to coach her a little. But whom is he kidding? She is not interested. Soon enough, she pulls out of the game completely and runs over to the camp of their towels. The beautiful boys do a couple of more throws, but the game is no longer fun. They follow her: Their girl.

Lovely. Really. It’s lovely — to not be so blind to life.

And I’ve only got half an hour left. I shoo away the fragmented thoughts of my next obligations. It’s my life — it’s not the life of others — in which even the breaks have to be disciplined.

I think I doze off. The smell of coconut and perfume brings me back up onto my elbows: Three meters down a family of four is stretching out a cotton sheet, bleached out to perfection. It’s gigantic, waving up in the air like a sail of a boat bringing home a beloved vagabond. The two sons are on one end of it: They are tall, lean — lovely, really. The father is giving out commands from the opposite end, but whom is kidding: He cannot stop from twisting his neck sideways toward a lean and handsome woman, applying sunblock all over her youthful body.

“Hence, the coconut,” I think; and I watch her bend over and slide her thin wrists along each leg, methodically.

This is the life of others. Not my life. And I find myself feeling romantic about it.

The family positions itself onto the white sheet: The handsome woman chooses her place first. The boys immediately flock her, in their unspoken adoration; but they cannot stay down for long. Soon enough, they take off for the tide, with so much youth ahead of them. The father inches over toward his lovely wife: His girl.

This is the life of others. And it’s quite lovely, really.

Okay. Five more minutes. I give myself — five more minutes. They can’t delay me too much. I squint toward the horizon where the two gigantic matters meet, but not where my home is.

My home — is just gonna have to be wherever I am. And wherever I am — is quite lovely, really.